Skip to main content
Preserve

Preserved Meat

Preserve meat by salting, sugaring, and storing in a cool place.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Meat and sugar are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 34% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 2,866 recipes. Both carry guaiacol, which smells smoky, sweet. The science ↓

Preserved Meat

Ingredients

Directions

Cure the meat

  1. Soak the meat in salt for 24 hours until the salt is melted and penetrated the meat.

  2. Drain the meat and wipe each piece dry with a clean cloth.

Prepare the salt mixture

  1. Heat a sufficient quantity of coarse sea salt in the oven.

  2. Mix the hot salt with about ⅓ cup of brown sugar.

Pack and store

  1. Rub each piece of meat well with the salt and sugar mixture.

  2. Pack the meat tightly in casks, using about ½ pound of the mixture for each pound of meat.

  3. Store in a cool place, minimizing exposure to air.

Recipe from a historical cookbook (Internet Archive).

Transcribed from a scanned cookbook and modernised for today's kitchens. Where the book gave no heat or time, or said "a moderate oven", the temperatures and times here may be modern equivalents rather than the book's own figures.

Explore the science

The flavor team

The pairs that carry this dish. Each one is judged two ways: how much their aromas overlap, and how often cooks already put them together.

  1. Meat + sugartop 34% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together2,866 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Meat
Is the food being preserved, taking up salt and sugar as it cures.
Coarse sea salt
Draws out moisture and penetrates the meat to preserve it.
Brown sugar
Adds sweetness and balances the harshness of the salt.

“What each ingredient does” and “The step that matters” were written by Claude from this recipe’s own method and reviewed in samples by CompKitchen.

You might also like

Green Corn PuddingGreen Corn Pudding64 recipesCornmeal mushCornmeal mush12 recipes